Sunday, July 8, 2012

from Buratti Fine Art ... Windows to the sacred a special exhibition showcasing the various
traditions and expression of esoteric art ranging from automatic
drawing, digital art, printmaking, sculpture and painting. The work of
contemporary artists are shown alongside international and historical
artists and who have paved the way in one of the art world's most
exciting genres.

Friday, July 6, 2012

"I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic
admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and
fine as a butterfly's wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and as
profound and cruel as the bitterness of life." Diego Rivera

from an old copy of Sulfur Magazine no 29 1991 featuring a few Unica Zurn anagrams

AND IF THEY HAVE NOT DIED

I am yours, otherwise it escapes andwipes us into death. Sing, burnSun, don’t die, sing, turn andborn, to turn and into Nothing isnever. The gone creates sense - ornot died have they and whenand when dead - they are not.

for Hans Bellmer.Berlin 1956

DANS L’ATTELAGE D’UN AUTRE AGE(Line from a poem by Henri Michaux)

Eyes, days, door, the old country.Eagle eyes, a thousand days old.

Ermenonville 1957

WILL I MEET YOU SOMETIME?

After three ways in the rain imagewhen waking your counterimage: he,the magician. Angels weave you inthe dragonbody. Rings in the way,long in the rain I become yours.

Ermenonville 1959

HANS BELLMER: POSTFACE TO HEXENTEXTE (UNICA ZÜRN)

ANAGRAMS are words and sentences resulting from the rearrangement of the letters in a given word or sentence. It is surprising that despite the re-awakened interest in the development of language in psychotics, psychics and children, little thought has been given to the anagrammatic interpretation of the coffee grounds of letters. - It is clear that we know very little of the birth and anatomy of the “image.” Man seems to know his language even less well than he knows his own body: the sentence too resembles a body which seems to invite us to decompose it, so that an infinite chain of anagrams may re-compose the truth it contains.

At close inspection the anagram is seen to arise from a violent and paradoxical dilemma. It demands the highest possible tension of the form-giving will and, simultaneously, the exclusion of premeditated purposeful shaping, because of the latter’s sterility. The result acknowledges - in a slightly uncanny manner - that it owes more to the help of some “other” than to one’s own consciousness. This sense of an alien responsibility and of one’s own technical limitations - only the given letters may be used and no others can be called upon for help - leads toward a hightened flair, an unrestrained and feverish readiness for discoveries, resulting in a kind of automatism. Chance seems to play a major role in the result, as if without it no language reality were true, for only at the end, after the fact, does it - surprisingly - become clear that this result was necessary, that no other was possible. Writing one anagram each day of the year would leave one with an accurate poetic weather report concerning one’s self at the end of that year.

What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up. They enter suddenly and for real into their interconnections, radiating multiple meanings, meandering loops lassoing neighboring sense and sound. They constitute new, multifacetted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors. “Beil” (hatchet) becomes “Lieb’” (Love) and “Leib” (body), when the hurried stonehand glides over it; the wonder of it lifts us up and rides away with us on its broomstick. The process remains enigmatic. For this kind of imaging and composing to happen, no doubt an eager hobgoblin - oracularly, sometimes spectacularly - adds much of its own behind the back of the I. A pleasantly disrespectful spririt, in all probability, who is serious only about singing the praises of the improbable, of error and of chance. As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance a proof of eternity.